


Wish upon a star

by most_curiously_blue_eyes



Series: Long journey home [1]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Daryl Dixon-centric, Hopeful Ending, Pre-Slash, Suicidal Thoughts, ignores post-time skip canon, mentioned canon relationships - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-18 09:54:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29241663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/most_curiously_blue_eyes/pseuds/most_curiously_blue_eyes
Summary: It's been years since the bridge, but Daryl is still looking. He can't give it up now; what else is there but a fool's hope?
Relationships: Daryl Dixon/Rick Grimes
Series: Long journey home [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2147178
Comments: 8
Kudos: 46
Collections: Daryl is gay/asexual so deal with it





	Wish upon a star

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gilven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gilven/gifts).
  * Inspired by [I'm still looking for him](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23303977) by [Gilven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gilven/pseuds/Gilven). 



> This story as a whole has been in my Google Docs for a long time. This is sort of a prologue, different in tone than the rest is going to be, thus I made it a separate story instead of a chapter. The rest of the story will be posted as a second entry in the series.
> 
> Please note this story mentions canon relationships, particularly Rick/Michonne, but I'm not tagging it 'cause it's brief and not really that important.  
> Please also be aware that I haven't watched a single episode of TWD after season 5. I just took a part of the premise I liked and went with it, so if it's not accurate, ignore the inaccuracies ;)

Sometimes, in the eerily silent, dark hours before dawn, Daryl wonders if he’s not still alive only out of habit. 

It’s been five years, seven months, three weeks and a day since the last time he saw Rick alive on that bridge. If he concentrated, Daryl could count the hours, too. Minutes. Before, he didn’t use to keep count of such things. It didn’t matter. Time, like many other constructs holding society in check, wasn’t that important to a drifter like him in the days of old, and nobody cared after the dead started walking. Now, all of a sudden, it is crucial to know how much time has passed: the longer it takes and the more of it passes, the smaller is the chance of ever finding Rick alive.

That chance was never significant to begin with, but Daryl doesn’t want to think about it, so he doesn’t. He also doesn’t think about how he’s been looking for Rick for almost twice as long as he knew him. 

It’s been quiet these last couple of weeks on the road. Not many dead around, save a straggler or two. Nobody living either, but that's hardly a surprise; normal people, people who survived this long, they stick together in their safe zones. Daryl's not like them anymore, though. Even if he met someone out here, he doubts he would’ve interacted. He’s got no business with strangers. Doesn’t need anyone. He’s been doing well on his own. Surviving. That’s what he’s always been good at. Even before Rick, before the world went to shit, Daryl knew how to feed himself and keep himself alive. He’s still doing it, he’s still surviving, going on way past his expiration date - five years, seven months, three weeks and a day past his expiration date, to be exact - and he’s fine on his own. He’s good. He is.

He didn’t make a fire tonight. There’s no need to, the nights are nice, warm. Won't get cold any time soon. Anyway, he’s got a poncho he scavenged from a car he found abandoned near Williamsburg, he carries it around just in case. Reminds him of the poncho he used to have in the prison. It’s darker, though, black-and-gray. Warm enough for a night in winter, if he’s still alive by then. But it’s summer now, the middle of August, the cold nights of January still a distant future. The moon is full, giving off enough of a glow for Daryl to see the vague shapes of grounded planes in the distance.

To be honest, he expected the airport to be overrun. He only came up here to check because he's made sure to check everywhere; it was a surprise to find the place completely deserted. There are evacuation notices in the buildings all around: yellowed print-outs citing a state of emergency, asking everyone to leave. Must’ve been quite effective, since there were no walkers in the terminals when Daryl snooped around. Maybe because this is just a regional port. It couldn't have been that hard to evacuate a small place like Lynchburg. Had he approached Dulles or Norfolk, he probably would’ve been swarmed with the dead within seconds. But he hadn't. He might. One day.

Daryl sighs and leans back against the control panel or whatever it is behind him. He’s not so sure if spending the night in the tower was his brightest idea; on the one hand, it gives him a broad view of his surroundings, but on the other - it’s only got one exit, so if there’s suddenly a herd coming out of nowhere, he’s done for. 

Not that he cares so much. Staying alive has been a chore for a long time now. Dying sounds more like a long-awaited ending to a dull book than something bad.

“Happy birthday, you bastard,” he mutters, and winces at the hoarse sound of his own voice in the emptiness. It doesn’t echo off the walls, but it’s jarring either way. On nights like this, Daryl misses the time he used to still be able to imagine Merle being there. His brother’s ghost, rude and irritating as it were, at least made for a nice illusion that he wasn’t so completely, desperately alone.

But he is. Isn’t he?

Five years, seven months, three weeks and a day. 

He never returned to Alexandria afterwards, after the bridge, not for longer than a couple of hours at best. A part of him knew there was nothing left to keep him there. Another part felt guilty: he left them, he left Michonne and lil’ ass-kicker, he deserted them at a time they needed his support. He should’ve stayed if only to protect them, but he knows it’s stupid: they never really needed him. What they needed was Rick, and Daryl was there when Rick was taken from them, and he didn’t do anything to prevent it.

 _I’d die for you,_ he told Rick in a pit in the ground many years ago. He can’t answer when a voice in the back of his mind, a voice that sounds like his own, but meaner, harsher, asks: _Why didn’t you?_

He didn’t return to Alexandria afterwards and instead, he followed the river. He doesn’t remember that too well; memories of that time right after the bridge are hazy, like something out of a fever dream. He recalls the empty feeling in his chest, the terrible, overwhelming void that threatened to devour him and turn him into one of the dead even with his heart still beating. He looked for Rick’s face in every walking corpse he slaughtered, dreading the moment death would stare blankly back at him from eyes which used to be so familiar; but it never happened. It never happened, but he didn't find Rick alive either, and finally Daryl reached the mouth of the river, and he stared at the ocean, and he screamed.

“Where the fuck are ya, huh?” He yelled at the vastness of the sea. “I was supposed to die for you! You wasn’t supposed to sacrifice yerself like some noble sack of shit. Why’d ya do that, Rick? After Merle, after Carl, you **knew** what that would do to us, to me! Why’d ya do it, you stupid son of a bitch?”

He kicked at the sand, threw himself into the waves, cried out as the cold pierced through his body with all the fierceness of death. But he didn’t find death that way, he didn’t die that evening. The ocean didn’t have an answer to his questions. The roar of the waves drowned out all words and sobs, burying them beneath the haunted song of the salty wind.

Eventually, Daryl had no more words to throw into the depths. No more tears left in him, no more rage to add towards the coming storm. Rick wasn’t there, and so Daryl didn’t need to be there either. 

That was the first time he ever saw the ocean.

“I never been,” he told Rick once, a long time ago. “Never gone outta Georgia before. Even in Georgia, only been ‘round the same old piece of woods. Ain’t got the kinda money for travelin’.”

“Well, look at it this way,” Rick said, giving him that crooked grin accompanied by an amused twinkle in his eyes. “Maybe the world’s ended, but it’s lettin’ us visit all these places we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Who knows, perhaps we’ll go see the ocean, too? A nice little family vacation.”

Daryl wonders sometimes. If the world never ended, if the dead never started walking. Had he met Rick in different circumstances - if he was just a guy in a bar, a neighbor, a damn homeless dude asking for spare change - what would it have been like? Would they have managed to become friends? He likes to imagine it. He likes to imagine a friendship that wasn’t forged in the fires of battle after battle fought in a desperate plight for survival. A genuine appreciation of each other for who they were, not for how much they were each worth to the group. Not based on how good of a leader one was, how good of a hunter the other. 

It’s a daydream, a pointless pastime, but if Daryl has anything in abundance, it’s his thoughts.

He’s fifty years old, more or less, according to his calculations. As a kid, he never expected to live a day past twenty. That turned to thirty, then forty, and then the world ended and he stopped expecting anything at all. For a while, he thought he’d be the first to die of their group. Why wouldn’t he think so? He was an outsider, somebody they had no reason to care about protecting. When he got injured during the search for Carol’s little girl - God, but that seems like a lifetime ago! - back then, he thought that was it. He got shot on top of everything, and he thought, _here goes._ But even then, there was Rick’s voice in his ears, panicked, and there were warm protective arms around him, and. He didn’t die. Somehow, he didn’t die.

And now he’s fifty years old, but at the same time, he thinks he’s been dead for close to six years. Five years, seven months, three weeks. And a day. That's how long he's been a dead man walking. Because it makes no sense that he outlived Rick, it’s just so goddamn stupid. So he chooses to believe he didn’t. He chooses to think he died that day at the bridge, too. It’s just that his body hasn’t caught up yet. 

Being alive is a nasty habit to shake off, he thinks.

He hasn’t had a smoke in… two years? Thereabouts. Not because he consciously tried to quit. He just wasn’t able to find smokes when he needed them, and then he realized he didn’t need them anymore, so he stopped trying to find them. He spent a whole summer in the mountains, stupidly following the river upstream. He happened upon an untouched campsite abandoned probably near the beginning of everything; he found a pair of boots which fit him inside the tent, and an iPod which surprisingly still had battery power so long after the end of the world. The music on it was dumb, some girlie songs about kisses in the rain and being insane, but Daryl took it with him anyway. Used it, too, until he got caught up in a rainstorm in the fall and got drenched to the bone. The iPod didn’t survive getting soaked. 

Daryl still hums some of those songs, sometimes. Helps him fall asleep.

He’s got a map he’s been taking notes on. He found it in a library in a place called Orange. What a stupid name for a city, he remembers thinking, and he still thinks that even though it’s been a long time. The map, it’s big-scale and foldable, and Daryl’s been putting markers on it. Points of interest. He wants to drop it off in Alexandria the next time he’s nearby; some locations he found might be good scavenging destinations. There’s an untouched Home Depot in Fairfax, with a lot of stuff to reinforce the walls and build shit. A cannery north of Rockville that might still be good for supplies; at least had been when Daryl was there last spring. A gardening depot near DC with all kinds of seeds and stuff. 

After giving it some thought, Daryl marks the Lynchburg airport as a noteworthy spot, too, before he folds the map and puts it back in the backpack.

He’s been all over the damn state. He backtracked to the area it all happened - to where that damn bridge used to be - and he went from there. Keeping Alexandria as the center, he’s been moving in a circle, steadily lengthening its diameter. Made it to Maryland, made it to West Virginia, and to North Carolina, and who the fuck knows where else. State lines don’t mean anything nowadays. Now he’s back in Virginia, and he’s wondering how much longer he’s going to keep it up.

There’s only one way it can end.

“I know,” Michonne said in the kitchen of the house Rick’s family shared back in Alexandria. Rick’s family: his woman, his kids, and for some reason, that family seemed to include Daryl Dixon. Someone who wasn’t supposed to be anyone to anyone else. But Rick considered him family, and so Daryl had a place in their house, a room all of his own, a bed to sleep in, a chair in the dining room for when they all ate together. Never felt like he belonged there, but that was alright, because Rick said he belonged, and Daryl believed it. He always believed in the things Rick said.

“I know,” Michonne told him, and Daryl acted like he didn’t understand. It was easy to just look at her and pretend to be confused, to make a face, _what the hell are ya on about, woman._ Easier than to look away and confirm the accusation she was making. 

“You should tell him,” she said, and she wasn’t angry. She wasn’t angry, she wasn’t sad. She reached out, squeezed Daryl’s shoulder, and he didn’t flinch. She was family. He didn’t flinch when his family touched him anymore. Not for a while, and it started with Rick.

“There’s always going to be a place for you here, with us,” Michonne promised him, and Daryl kept the words with him even though he didn’t understand them. He didn’t ask, _what do you mean,_ he didn’t wonder. He just took the promise out of Michonne’s mouth, folded it carefully and tucked it away in the back of his mind for later. A later that never came. He never let it come.

Birthdays have a way of making a man nostalgic. It’s Rick’s birthday today, possibly, probably; the timing seems right, mid-August or thereabouts. Daryl’s mind returns to a birthday many years ago. His own. Back at the prison, during their first winter there, harsh and difficult, but better than the previous one on the road. They didn’t have a sure way of telling the date, but Beth said it was February and nobody argued, and February meant it was Daryl’s birthday. It came up by accident, Daryl didn’t mean for the entire group to know but they found out anyway, and they decided a birthday had to be celebrated.

They didn’t have much to celebrate with, but they made do. Carol made some sort of rice waffles which didn’t taste like anything in particular on their own, but were decent with some strawberry jam from the plastic packets Glenn found on a run. They had a good amount of booze at the prison, so there was that. No music, but they had Beth, so she sang. She tried to match what she thought was Daryl’s musical taste: she sang a few of the better-known Skynyrd pieces, _Sweet Home Alabama,_ and other southern rock hits she knew. She was so proud of herself, Daryl didn’t have the heart to tell her he didn’t recognize half of the songs and hated the rest. Besides, he liked them when Beth sang them. They were for him.

Nobody had prepared any gifts, but Daryl didn’t care about that. He didn’t need no shit anyway. It was still the best birthday he ever had. The first time someone thought his being alive was something worth celebrating. 

And now Daryl is fifty years old, and he feels the half-century worth of sorrow weigh on his shoulders. He didn’t feel this way back in winter when it was his birthday, but somehow, it's Rick’s summer birthday that reminds him of the passage of time like nothing else. He’s an old man now. There are pains in his body that didn’t use to be there. He’s still strong, but he can’t walk quite as fast, quite as far anymore. The sparse hairs in his beard are completely white, and Daryl knows if he looked closely into a mirror, he’d see lines in his face that are the markings of time, not exhaustion.

Fifty years is a long time to survive.

“We are the walking dead,” Rick said back in that barn, and Daryl still remembers being so angry with what he thought was an admission of defeat.

“We ain’t them,” he insisted. “We ain’t them.”

But he is just like them, isn’t he? Always has been, when it all comes down to the basics. Walking on, pointless. He had a goal in mind, in the beginning of this journey. Desperate, hopeless really, but still a goal: to find him. To find Rick. Dead, alive, it wasn’t as important as the simple fact of finding him. Of _knowing._ He couldn’t stand not knowing. He had to be sure. He saw it happen, he saw the bridge explode, but. _He didn’t see Rick die._ Not with his own two eyes, so he went searching, and he didn’t allow himself to hope, not really, but. He still did. He hoped.

And then he saw the ocean, vast and dark and angry, and he screamed over the roaring of the waves, and when he was done, it felt like being dead.

_Rest in peace - now get up and go to war._

Words. Everything, his whole life, all summarized with a quote from an anecdote Rick told them in another lifetime. Daryl thinks about that night sometimes. The storm, the walkers on the other side of the door. Just one more night when it was almost over. It was almost over, and Daryl wouldn’t have minded if it all ended that night because at least, they were all there together.

Had he died that night by Rick’s side, it would’ve been his happy ending.

Years later, Daryl still remembers the emptiness in Rick’s eyes as he told that story. Rick thought that was it for them, too. But against all odds, they survived: that night and many other nights afterwards, and they found a home. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t paradise, they had to work to make it theirs, but eventually they managed and for a while, they had peace. For a moment, they were living instead of just surviving.

“I feel better when you’re here,” Rick said after one particular recruitment run with Aaron kept Daryl away from Alexandria for longer than expected. Three weeks when they were supposed to have only been gone a few days at most; worse yet, they returned empty-handed, with a few new scars and a few dozen killed walkers under their belts. Instead of being angry or disappointed, though, Rick was relieved to see them back. To see Daryl back. He fussed over each and every scrape. He examined Daryl thoroughly and insisted on cleaning every little scratch, muttering something about wounds becoming infected. Back then, Daryl was irritated over being treated like a child. In hindsight, he wonders. 

_There’s always going to be a place for you here, with us,_ Michonne told him, and what if? 

What if, what if, what if.

 _What if I find him one day,_ Daryl wonders, _what if he’s gone and I need to put him down?_

_Will I be able to?_

He doesn’t know the answer to that question. He wants to believe he’s strong enough. If that’s what happened to Rick, then he deserves to be put to rest. Daryl wants to believe he’ll be able to give it to him. But he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. Deep down, he hopes if it comes to that, Rick - the walker that used to be Rick - fuck, but the thought is unbearable; he hopes that he’ll get bitten too, before he puts a knife through Rick’s brain. Through its brain. And then he’ll truly be dead, too. Because if he’s bitten, then, well. There’s no cure. There’s no other way it can end but him following Rick, to whatever sorry end.

But he needs to find Rick first. 

In five years, seven months, three weeks and one day, he’s never come across a single track hinting at whatever happened to Rick after the bridge besides the Colt Python they found with Michonne. And isn’t it odd? He should’ve found something. Anything. A boot print in the muddy ground at the river banks. A walker with Rick’s face. A half-eaten corpse at the mouth of the river. An end to all hope. But there’s been nothing. Nothing down the river, nothing all over Virginia. Nothing in Maryland, nothing in North Carolina, wherever the fuck else he’d been, nothing. Rick is gone. Gone, disappeared without a trace. Like he never even existed.

And Daryl wonders, was Rick Grimes just a dream he had one night? Feels like it, sometimes. On nights like tonight, too bright to sleep but too dark to travel, Daryl feels like he dreamed up a man who saw something in him, something of worth, and he dreamed up the family that welcomed him, and he dreamed up the safe place they all used to call home. Because if it wasn’t a dream, how come he let it slip through his fingers like sand? How come everything is gone?

 _I’d die for you,_ he said to Rick, but he didn’t die. Rick did. Probably. He can’t still be alive after all this time; he would’ve returned to them if he was. Would’ve returned to Alexandria, to his family. To Michonne and Judith. To the baby Michonne gave birth to: Rick’s son.

Daryl never returned to Alexandria, but Alexandria sometimes reached out to him. Last fall, he spent a week nearby, in that barn, that same barn, and Jesus found him. Brought him food and new clothes, brought him news. Judith was fine. Michonne wasn’t, but she was getting there. The boy kept her sane. Their son. Rick Junior, she called him. Little RJ.

“You could come back,” Jesus suggested. “I’m sure Michonne would appreciate the help. It’s hard, leading a community when she’s got two kids to take care of.”

 _There’s a place for you,_ was what he meant. But Daryl said nothing back and he left that same evening, disappeared into the night, away from Alexandria, away from the people he disappointed. Away from where Rick wasn’t and back towards where he still could be.

Carol explained to him what survivor’s guilt meant. She knew it from experience; she lost Sophia and for a long time she blamed herself. She lost those little girls, Lizzie and Mika, and she thought it was her fault. She said, after Beth, that was what Daryl was feeling, too. He wasn’t so sure. Still isn’t. After Beth, after Glenn, after Rick. Is it survivor’s guilt - an irrational urge to blame himself for surviving when somebody else didn’t; it can’t be that when it is actually all his fault they’re gone. He lost Beth, that’s on him. Glenn, too, even if Maggie says otherwise, even if everyone says otherwise. And Rick. Daryl left him alone, and Rick got himself injured, and all that other shit happened, but if only Daryl didn’t try to go behind Rick’s back in the first place… And Rick was so close there in the end, so close to be within sight but still too far, just outside Daryl’s reach, and Daryl could’ve done _something,_ should’ve-

He did nothing, and a little boy in Alexandria has to grow up without ever knowing his father.

“I’ll never stop looking,” he promised Michonne. She looked at him, she looked and she understood what he meant. That he’ll never return. That he’ll find Rick, that he’ll find whatever’s left of Rick, or he’ll die trying. That he’ll probably die anyway. She understood and she didn’t offer to go with him. 

Oh, she wanted to. She was waiting for a word, a sign from Daryl: any indication at all that he’d take her along. Even heavily pregnant, even hurt after what happened with that woman and her Goddamn army of children, Michonne wanted to go looking for the man she loved. She’d have taken Judith and followed Daryl all over the country. She would’ve maybe found some closure that way, eventually.

Daryl didn’t let her have that. He held her hand in which she clutched Rick’s revolver, and he shook his head.

“I’ll find him for you,” he said, and that was it. 

He didn’t need to elaborate, didn't need to flap his tongue to explain. Michonne understood him long before anybody else did besides Rick, even before Carol really did. She was an outsider looking in, trying to find her place, just like him. She knew him, and that’s how she knew she couldn’t change his mind. Instead, she kissed his forehead before he went, a farewell, a blessing, a last goodbye; and she told him to return.

“When you find him, come back to us. I promised you once, and I promise this again: there’s still a place for you. You’re ours, Daryl.”

But the dead don’t belong with the living, and despite her words, Daryl knows Michonne didn’t expect to ever see him again when she said her farewells. At least she got to say goodbye to him. Neither of them had that chance with Rick.

And now it’s been five years, seven months, three weeks and one day since the bridge, and it’s Rick’s birthday. Daryl chuckles to himself, bitter and hollow, and…

And he misses home terribly.

Rick could always read him best. One day, when Daryl was particularly agitated about something silly or another, someone in Alexandria talking shit, the usual - Rick came out to the porch and sat with him for what must’ve been hours. Hours of silence, but it wasn’t awkward. It never was, not when it was the two of them.

Eventually, Rick spoke. He said: “You think you don’t belong in this life, this place, but that’s not true. We’re here, Daryl. I’m here, and you belong with me. Just the way you are. Terrible grammar, bad table manners, weird aversion to showers and all. Okay?”

And because he expected an answer, Daryl sighed and said, “Okay,” and that was that. Nothing changed, but everything changed, too. Gradually, slowly, Alexandria became less _foreign_ and more _family,_ until one day, during a run with Aaron, Daryl found himself saying _Let’s go home_ and meaning it.

Home is where the heart is, an old saying goes. Makes sense, Daryl supposes; his heart is gone just like Rick is gone, and so he’s homeless, wandering aimlessly, endlessly, following roads that lead nowhere. He sleeps in old houses or abandoned airports, he eats grass and charred meat and tree bark, he follows ghosts he doesn’t see, and none of it even matters because he doesn’t think he’s ever going back. Not until he finds Rick: dead, alive, walking or not. 

He’s begun to resign himself to the truth that it will never happen, that he’s going to wander across the wastelands of the old world alone, forever.

He likes the way he can see the sky from up here. The old control tower stands tall in the middle of nowhere. There is no more light pollution, it doesn’t matter how close to the city - or how far - the airport really is. Stars litter the dark canvas of the night sky, constellations Daryl thinks he might’ve known the names of at some point. Rick knew some of them, he remembers:

 _That one’s the Big Dipper, and right there’s the Little Dipper. Kinda like little ass-kicker, huh?_ \- and a low chuckle, and Carl rolling his eyes, and everyone smiling. A lifetime ago. Before Alexandria, before the war, before everything. Back at the prison. Did it ever even happen? Seems like a dream Daryl had once upon a time. All of it, all the good memories, he isn’t sure they’re not just echoes from a dream. People who cared about him. People he cared about. Warm hands clasping his shoulders, a warm voice telling him _good job,_ warm eyes saying what never needed to be said out loud. 

Years and months, weeks and days, and it’s all gone.

There’s a shooting star spilling across the sky. Another, and one more. It’s the middle of August, after all, Rick’s birthday. The time of falling stars. As a boy, dumb and naive, Daryl used to climb up on the tallest tree, or the roof if he couldn’t get out of the house, and he stared at the shooting stars, making wish upon wish, again and again; the same wish every time, the same stupid plea: _wanna be happy._ Meaningless, in the end. Of course pieces of falling rocks very far above couldn’t actually grant wishes. He knew that. He knew, but he still hoped, and even though the damn stars disappointed him year after year, he still had that hope.

Still has it, maybe, but this time, as he follows the small trail of light moving across the night, his wish is different. 

_Just give me a sign,_ he wishes with all of his might, with all of the faith, all of the childhood innocence that’s still left in him after all that he went through during his fifty years in this world. There’s not much of it, but he prays it’s enough. 

_Just one sign that yer still alive, Rick._

The star glows brighter for but a brief second; _must be an illusion,_ Daryl thinks, refusing to blink as he follows its journey across the sky. And then it's gone. Silence follows its death, silence broken by nothing but Daryl’s own breathing. Then, footsteps resound in the dark, faint at first, then closer, and Daryl’s heart skips a beat.

He thinks, _Is that it?_ \- and a spark of hope ignites in his chest, warming him from the inside even though he knows it’s such a foolish thing to hope for. Wishes don’t come true. Still, just this once, may it be? 

But no; as the sound draws nearer, Daryl realizes what he’s hearing is not human footsteps. It’s just the dog coming back from whatever it was doing outside. The soft-padded paws make a noise on the metal staircase, and Daryl sighs, somehow disappointed even though he knew he was being stupid.

That dog is a new addition; so new, Daryl still sometimes forgets about it. He found it in the outskirts of a town which used to have a name, but no longer seemed to when he came upon it: the road signs were gone, as were most of the buildings and street lamps. It looked like a tornado went through the town, levelling everything to the ground, leaving behind just a haunted ruin. The dog was young, stupid and so thin it looked like it was about to keel over just from standing there. It wasn’t scared of Daryl when he approached, and Daryl thought, _what the fuck._ He gave it some of his own dinner of deer jerky, and the dog has been following him around since then.

It leaves to do its own thing, from time to time, whatever that thing might be. It always returns, though, to cuddle up to Daryl and keep him warm even though there’s no need; or maybe it’s just lonely. Like people, dogs are social animals. They don’t survive on their own. They need to be part of something bigger. 

The dog comes to him with a gift. It does this sometimes: finds interesting shit and brings it to Daryl, expecting praise and pets in return. Random things, mostly useless trash, single boots, old plastic bottles, a box of tampons on one notable occasion that made Daryl actually chuckle in amusement.

“The girls back home would love ya for this,” he said, startling the poor beast who wasn’t used to hearing his voice, or any voice for that matter.

This time, it’s not a box of tampons the dog puts by Daryl’s feet. It’s a satchel, old and threadbare, with a broken zipper opening. Daryl has to rip it open to get to the contents, and he frowns at the sight of a tape recorder and a few compact cassettes to accompany it. They’re the thirty-minutes-per-side type, and all are labelled with numbers, from number two to seven, which is still inside the recorder. Intrigued, Daryl presses the rewind button, and he’s surprised to find the thing still has juice.

“Think it’s got some music on it?” He asks the dog and strokes it behind the ears. “Wouldn't hate it. Missin’ the good stuff somethin’ terrible, ya know. Lita Ford maybe. Van Halen. Hell, even Def Leppard. The good old shit. Wonder what happened to all ‘em fuckers makin’ music,” he says. He chuckles, shaking his head as he looks down at the cassette recorder. “Let’s just hope it ain’t _Sweet Home Alabama,_ ‘mkay? I really hate that shit.”

The dog whines softly and nuzzles Daryl's hand. Daryl huffs, smiling at the attention-seeking animal, and scratches it behind the ears. It deserves the reward after all. It did good.

Once the animal is appeased, Daryl focuses on the cassette recorder again. He blows on it to get rid of the dust settled all over the speakers, presses play, and then his mind comes to a halt, because - _no way, this can’t be, what the hell?_ \- because for the first time in five years, seven months, three weeks and one day, he hears Rick’s voice.

It’s grainy, the quality sucks major balls, but it’s unmistakable. Daryl would recognize that small-town southern drawl everywhere, even after all this time. It’s Rick. It’s Rick’s voice in the recording, and that’s… how? How is this possible?

“Where’d ya find this?” Daryl asks softly, looking at the dog. He gets up, grabs his crossbow and backpack, then points to the satchel. “Show me. C’mon dog, show me!”

The dog tilts its head, but it seems excited to leave the tower with Daryl in tow. It runs down the stairs and Daryl follows, two steps at a time, and his heart is pounding so fast, he thinks he might be having a heart attack. 

_Rick,_ he thinks, fear, hope, excitement all bubbling in his chest simultaneously like he's about to explode, _I’m comin’ for ya._

_I'm gonna find ya._

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on Tumblr as most--curiously--blue--eyes and I even post things sometimes! You can come see, and you can shout at me there :D


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